Hamburg Airport Signage

Airport signage in Hamburg. Main locations such as check-in, terminals and gates are in the sans serif typeface Univers, secondary locations such as toilets, restaurants, cafés are in the serif typeface Sabon.

Serifs and signage can go together very well, it’s rather the thin strokes often being too thin (or too thick, in case of a Slab / Egyptian) or the spacing being too tight, the contrast between the luminance densities of type and background being too high (especially in back-lit signage) and the surface being too glossy.

Personally, I don’t care about ‘old’ that much. I think that for white-on-black signage, especially for the back-lit signs, the spacing should have been slightly wider and the thin strokes a bit thicker. Also the ‘o’ of the italic is far too wide, because Sabon was drawn for Linotype duplex-matrices. So in the end, maybe Sabon is just not ‘old’ enough :–) A revived Garamond, based on smaller sizes for letterpress could lead to a better result. From a stylistic point of view, I’d rather prefer a contemporary Garalde such as Swift as a secondary typeface for an airport.

Source: http://www.flickr.com. Uploaded to Flickr by Pool Albert-Jan and tagged with “sabon”. License: All Rights Reserved.